7 History Experts Reveal the Most Unsettling Declassified Information Available Today

It’s no secret that everyday society is definitely left out of the loop until either the ends justify the means, or we can do nothing about anyway. Reddit asked their users to provide serious examples of once classified information now available to all walks of life and we’ve made a collection of the most mind-boggling posts below. More ways humans are terrible.

EUGENICS OF THE PAST
The Department of Health and Human Services practiced female sterilization on Native American women all the way through the 1970’s. Kinda sobering knowing that we were using tax dollars to suppress indigenous birth rates less than 50 years ago. More here if interested.

RADIOLAB
There was an episode of Radiolab that talks about an enormous secret facility in Britain that houses the British empires secret archives. The way they describe it, it sounds like the place where the Ark of the covenant is stored at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What they uncover in the episode is the human rights atrocities that were committed by British troops during the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya during the 1950’s. There were details in the uncovered documents about detention camps and torture that occurred during the conflict. It gave grounds for surviving Mau Mau to seek compensation against the crown in recent years. The atrocities of the conflict were not widely known about until recently.

COLD WAR ATROCITIES
The CIA's family jewels. It’s a collection of fucked up shit the CIA did during the Cold War. Highlights include sexually assaulting prisoners to make them more likely to fail a lie detector test and the various wire taps and standing orders to read all mail to and from Russia. The linked document has a table of contents.

HUMAN EXPERIMENTATION
Human experimentation conducted by multiple governments. The Japanese famously conducted human experimentation research on the Chinese and Koreans.

The United States had doctors infect minorities with incurable diseases and STDs to see how the disease progressed. They were used to test treatments and to understand infection rates. The name of the most well-known site conducting that research, Unit 731 for those wondering. They performed vivisections, forced people to infect each other and children with STDs namely syphilis, freeze people’s limbs solid and record the damage and results, and perform a battery of other brutal tests. On one occasion, a child was repeatedly hit in the head with a hammer to study affects of repeated cranial trauma.

There are reports of scientists raping captives because they were bored or had time to waste before their experiments. There were many pregnancies carried full term within the facilities. These children born in captivity were also experimented on and sometimes born with syphilis. Researchers and guards would call women infected with syphilis “Jam-filled-buns.” Experiments attempting to weaponize the Bubonic Plague also took place.

The most disturbing part is that when it was shut down, rather than be charged with war crimes, the US pardoned the researchers in exchange for all their information. These war criminals walked free and the US got a nice payday of bio and chemical weaponry data, some of which is still undisclosed.

PROJECT BLUEBIRD
Bluebird was the CIA dosing 7,000+ military members with LSD without their knowledge in the pursuit of a “truth serum”. Also used were PCP, mescaline and heroin.

COUNT YOUR LUCKY STARS
On January 3, 1961, a United States B-52 bomber went into a tail spin and broke up mid air, accidentally dropping two Mark-39 hydrogen bombs over Goldsboro, North Carolina. One of the bombs worked exactly as intended, its parachute deployed and its triggers activated, armed and ready to detonate on impact, 3 of the 4 safety switches failed, a single low voltage switch prevented two 4 megaton nuclear explosions.